Blame Google

Emergent Chaos pokes deserved fun at the CYA tactics — or simple ignorance — of the Catawba County (NC) Public School System’s explanation of how student social security numbers ended up being searchable.

“We asserted that Google had somehow bypassed our login information, not that they had hacked their way into the system. Hacking, to me assumes malicious intent and we never intended to imply that Google was doing anything other than spidering all the web sites available.”

“We acted so aggressively with Google because, until the media got involved, we could not get beyond an operator at Google. We could not get operators to connect us with technical support, the legal department, or to anyone higher up in the organization. We were only given an email address to which we could submit a complain – which we did but got no response. “